


When We Watch A Fire, What Are We Looking For?

by Berguba



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bondage, Both Exhibitionism And Voyeurism Are Contained Within The Domain Of The Beholding, Breathplay, Cervical Play, Ditto for the forced variants thereof, Drug Use, Dubcon (CNC), ELIAS KEEPS TRYING TO DO ONTOLOGICAL MONOLOGUES, ESPECIALLY for those, Elias is not a licensed medical practitioner, Exhibitionism, F/M, Forced Exhibitionism, Forced Voyeurism, Gas Mask, I'm Rarepair Gremlin, It's OK They're Godmonsters, Look at the title and consider, Medical Play, Mind Reading, Now there's more eyes because it's warmer, Partial Paralysis (Temporary), Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Rarepair, Recreational Drug Use, S&M, The Top Is The Chatty One, The ending looks happy and that's what's important right?, Voyeurism, do not try at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 20:17:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20215666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Berguba/pseuds/Berguba
Summary: Elias and Agnes have deffo been dating a while. This is them doing an sex. There's drugs, mind reading, and very vague references to "anatomy". Mind you this is still explicit, and has a very unexplained (within the text) ending. I hope to write a sequel with sufficient pain and explanation, when I can.





	When We Watch A Fire, What Are We Looking For?

“Really? Don’t you think I’m tied down enough, already?” She strains slightly, testing the bonds, and pouts. Agnes glares at the frames of Elias’s glasses; she doesn’t dare to look into his eyes proper.

The man sighs, hooking his thumbs into his pants pockets. “I wish I was more surprised that you’re still upset about that. I mean, honestly, I didn’t anticipate _that._”

“It’s not like you tried to prevent it.” Her grumble has sunk deeper, unbuoyed by Elias’s half-hearted excuse. She looks away entirely, her cheek flopping against the steel of the headrest. It feels cold, against her skin, but she can see the heat-haze rising from it, further distorting her hazy reflection.

Elias runs one hand through his hair, sweeping it back in a superfluous, nervous motion, and considers her severely. “Yes. I just watched. My, my, what an extraordinarily uncommon event.” The sarcasm, for its coldness, is sufficiently self-deprecating that Agnes can recognize it as the highest form of self-recrimination he is capable of.

“Right. But, as you would say, ‘it occupies the same conceptual space,’ which, given your obsession with _concepts_, I would _think-” _Her anger bursts like a geyser, fed by her frustration, but is interrupted before she can work herself into a frenzy.

“Tell me, is this _ever_ enough?” A difficult question to ask, when he knows everyone in the room knows everyone in the room knows the answer. Nothing to learn, here. But he has something to prove here, something to teach. And that's reason enough.

“Well, no, but-” Agnes knows better than to lie now, not when she lies at the mercy of the primary advocate for the Watcher’s Crown, knowledge’s greatest living zealot. He doesn’t give her time to offer any extenuating context of her insatiability. She knows that is just as well.

“Do you ever let this end without running your mouth, just begging me to continue?” She meets his gaze, now, and finds it cold. The color of his eyes is not a normal color. Nor a color just anyone would notice. But she can see it, as _it_ can see her. She shivers, a frisson of recognition of an alien power. It does not _compel_ Elias, nor her, of course - how could it, when that would skew whatever results it is interested in? - but it _is_ watching, more, even, than usual.

“No, b-” Again, she is allowed no excuse.

“Do you _really_ think you’re the only one with internalities or _hungers_?” The room seems to darken, to polarize as light seeks the shortest path to his gaze, each photon eager to deliver its message.

“Well…” Only now does Agnes notice her blush, her increasing arousal. The way he’s _looking_ at her. The way she's being _watched_. As though there is something there worthy of his attention. She wants so badly to be worthy of his attention.

“You’re not. Now, as you were speaking of concepts earlier-” A matter of fact statement, and a segue into the exact sort of tutorial she had mocked him for already, his attention slipping from the immanent to the conceptual.

“Really? You tie me down and then _lecture _me?” A second mocking couldn’t hurt, then. Besides, the way he had looked at her when she had complained earlier.

“I could gag you, too, I suppose, but I do so enjoy your pretty voice.” He is equal parts thoughtful and lecherous, albeit distilled to a high purity, delivered with a cold, clinical air so appropriate to the design of this room. A soundproofed cellar, with runnelled ceramic flooring, a preponderance of stainless steel medical equipment - much of it with bespoke insulated handles, much to the confusion of several metalworkers in the greater London area - and, placed centrally within a pentagram defined by cameras on tripods, the robust, remotely adjustable steel medical chair, outfitted with a suite of restraints.

“It’s all the mushy crap that’s gonna make me gag.” She smiles, her mood lifted by the compliment, and sticks out her tongue.

“You’re blushing. Do be careful of the smoke detector,” he returns her smile, and recalls, not unfondly (there are no bad memories, only memory) when Agnes had to provide the good folks from the fire department an explanation that diverged in several key ways from the truth. Elias is fairly certain he would see at least one of them again, in a more professional context, and removed a degree.

Elias sorts carefully through his instruments, drawing out a case of four small syringes. When Agnes sees them, she can't resist another remark, in an attempt to hide her very real trepidation "Oh no, Doctor, do I have a fever?"

"I would certainly expect so. However, I have no desire to break a thermometer and interrupt this with the boring work of mercury cleanup, so I'll skip the formality." His smile is thin, but sincere, as he looks her up and down again, his eyes like needles, themselves, "Now, be a good girl and let me give you your medicine."

Agnes complies, wincing as he methodically delivers the dose in each syringe - ampoules preloaded with a milky looking fluid - to the inner back of each of her knees, and just beside each of her ‘funny bones’. A sensation like a fresh, cold sheet being tightened about her limbs washes from the points of injection, until all her limbs feel as though they have been wrapped in icy silk, sheer, and more than merely skin-tight. She fancies she can feel it wrapped around her very bones. Maybe deeper. She flexes her fingers experimentally, and finds that she did not, in fact, flex her fingers at all. It’s like her limbs have been set to read only. Her breath begins to come quicker. This is new, and far more exciting than she’ll admit aloud.

“Anyway, as I was saying, about concepts; consider what you’re currently experiencing. Locally-applied neuromuscular blocking agents — exactly enough to paralyze your limbs. To, and I feel I must stress this given your lack of focus, _take them away from you_. Sure, it’s not permanent, but it is potent, isn’t it? That dread of lost control. It’s a part, a big, under-appreciated part of _your_ god. Why do you think people turn to the Web to escape it? And I am watching you. But, of course, that’s not all.” Agnes catches on quickly, and looks into the blinking red light of the nearest camera, her eyes widening. Elias continues, withdrawing an implement she can’t quite crane her head to see, “After all, the watcher’s domain includes both seeing and _being seen._ I’m watching you be watched. Watching your reaction as I explain to you that these cameras aren’t _just_ recording. I wonder if you can guess who might be watching on the other end? Who do you think, Agnes?” Some of the drug, whatever it was, Agnes thought, must have affected her mouth. Her jaw was limp, and she struggled to open her mouth to answer, to say the name rising in her throat, to tell her to stop watching, perhaps.

Elias waits, patiently, and, seeing the expression in Agnes’s eyes, and the horror in her mind, smiles, "The first guess that popped into your mind was Jude, yes? I am _so_ proud of you. Hey, why don’t you wave? Here, I'll untie you.”

Agnes’s arm, free of the binding, slides slightly down the armrest, but displays no voluntary movement. Agnes wants to cover what she can of herself, to hide from the circle of electric eyes, but her arm will not respond. Each attempt only succeeds in increasing, briefly, the sensation of cold pressure, commensurate with the effort with which she wills it to move.

“Well, go on, then,” Elias encourages her, with pseudo-saccharine sadism, and her heart thrills, “Or, could it be you don't want to say hello to miss Perry? I mean, she can't hear you. Just see. Maybe give her a smile?" He grins, as if to demonstrate, and waits.

"Well, if you're not going to use it for anything, I'll just re-secure your arm,” and so he does, before inquiring as to her comfort.

"Mnhm" A low moan is all she can manage.

"Oh, you don't need to try to answer. I know. I just wanted you to know that I care. Your comfort is very important to me.” He makes the platitude sound like a threat, or an enticement. “Ooh, here's something interesting: Jude can't hear our conversation, and she doesn't know me by sight, or, of course, where we are. I'm rather pleased with finding this intersection. Watching yourself lose something, losing all hope that you ever had towards reciprocation, and not knowing enough about what you're seeing to do anything about it."

"T-t-t-t,” another futile attempt at speech, as she tries to plead an equally futile case.

"Stop that, or you’ll bite your tongue. I know you want to tell me to turn the cameras off, or at least stop broadcasting. You, of course, know that I won't, and we both know I'm not the only one enjoying this." He raises the chair to nearly eye-level — perfectly aligned with the cameras, and reveals the instrument in his hands - an old-style, stainless steel speculum, and Agnes is briefly distracted by a mental image of a metal-beaked swan, before he continues his speech. “You know, there’s _so much of you _that Jude will almost certainly never be able to see in person… have you ever heard of the concept of _noblesse oblige?_" She has, of course, from Diego. She had never expected _that_ concept to come up in Elias’s cellar, though.

“I would advise that you try to relax, but I doubt you have enough control, at the moment. On the upside, you still retain full sensation. Isn’t that nice? And, in further good news, I have a solution to that, as well.” He lays the instrument on a table, within her view, where her gaze can lie upon the device that so soon will invade her. “Can you lift your head? Just a bit.” While she had been looking at the imposing tool, he had withdrawn something else — a white, ceramic gas mask, with a black silicone seal, straps of the same heat-resistant cloth, and a strange, centrally located dial that resembled nothing so much as a revolver’s cylinder, albeit with three open chambers rather than the stereotypical six. She complies, and as he fastens it securely, he explains, “Now, this _will_ muffle you a bit, but with how inarticulate you’re being, I don’t think that’ll be _too_ much of an issue, do you?”

Agnes makes some sort of a sound, soft and needy, but wordless and stifled by the mask. It does not cover her eyes, and so she can see when he withdraws three cartridges - green, purple, and orange - and holds them up like a stage magician.

“Can you move your head, sweetie?” His voice is gentle, now, and she feels sure that if he could stroke her hair without insulated gloves, he would. She nods, very faintly, and is rewarded by his praise, “Well done. Now, listen carefully. I’m not going to tell you which is which, but one of these contains alcohol, another has refined cannabis resin, and the last is a synaesthetic hallucinogen. Any one of these would be sufficient to relax you the appropriate amount, and you get to choose. Just tilt your head towards the one you pick, ok?” The purpose of the chambers, if not the exact mechanism, now clear to her, she pauses, eyes flicking between them. She doesn’t know which is which, or even which she’d pick if she knew. She's not sure what _synaesthetic_ even means.

She lets her head loll to the right - orange, and Elias smiles, but says nothing. He puts the selected cartridge into the topmost chamber, screws a lid over the cylinder and pushes it until it snaps into place, sealing that part of the mask. There’s still the lower hole, through which she can breathe, and she does so gratefully, wondering what fate she has chosen, until Elias screws on a hose to that, attached to a sealed, balloon-like bag, with an adjustable valve at the end. His timing, of course, was perfect — the bag was empty, and she had just inhaled; as he closed the valve, her breath filled the sack. Then, slowly, he twists the cylinder until it clicks, hisses, and releases a fine, cool mist onto her lips. She barely tastes it before it vaporizes, sublimating from her inhuman body temperature and filling the air she’s breathing with a vapor she _still_ doesn’t know the exact nature of.

The air that, she realizes, isn’t going anywhere, or coming from anywhere, trapped by the apparatus. Agnes knows enough about combustion to know plenty about oxygen, and as her lungs fill with less and less of the stuff with each breath she takes, a delicious fear begins to rise in her. She’s distracted enough by the fear that at first she doesn’t notice that she can hear the recording light of the cameras, an orchestra of alto violins, just out of sync, rising and falling around her, leaking in through her peripheral vision. The pressure of the metal of the operating chair is deep royal blue, rolling like a river. She tastes phantom cinnamon on her lips, and sees-feels the heat of the air around her as a deepening green, spiked with orange slivers. A thunderstorm rages in her lungs, coruscating sheet lightning demanding air and just as quickly expelling it in disgust as it returns with a saturation of carbon dioxide. She hyperventilates, and she can feel that if she _could_, she would be thrashing around like a dying fish, bucking against her restraints. Instead, she is almost wholly still. Her eyelids flutter, darkness beginning to close in around the world as her vision starts to sigh away.

A moment.

A moment?

And then there is fresh air, filtering slowly in, but more, enough to give her the strength to gasp again, however reflexively. The air is sweet - literally _sweet_ like antifreeze, and she opens her eyes to see Elias setting the unsealed air-sack back down. Rings of ultra-violet fluid seem to emanate from him, almost even to compose him, somehow, under the surface. He leans down, and she feels his breath, howling white-cold, between her legs. She doesn’t squirm, but he knows she _would_. Her stillness, however, is an asset, as he maneuvers the medical implement - slightly larger than she is wholly confident about even while closed - and she feels wasp-buzzing warmth, spreading around it. She gasps as she simultaneously realizes her level of arousal and feels the invading object begin to slide home. The metal is cooler than her chair, rings blue and high-pitched within her, a sharp contrast to the topaz thrumming she can feel welcoming it. She isn’t ready - can’t be ready - when it begins to open. It is slow, but she experiences an echo of each click as the ratchet mechanism trips past the gear-teeth, and an echo of each echo, cascading until it feels like she is being opened, opened, opened, the present stretching to contain ever more of the past. It is slow, it takes a long time, and all that time is, to her, _now._

Elias revels, the deeply immediate vicarious sensation both arousing and enlightening, (for as much as he distinguishes the two emotional states) and, as Agnes’s eyes open wide in delight, reminds her, “Jude is watching, you know.” His voice reaches her in the same color-past-color viscosity that he is, now, and she slowly absorbs the words, distilling their meaning from the language in which they reached her, decoding the sound-shape-texture of his voice. He watches her process, the agonizing molasses through which meaning must wade to reach her, and times his next statement such that she has no time (from her perspective, of course) to dwell upon the first before the second arrives: “She’d almost certainly never tell you this, so I will. She’s crying. But enough about her, hmm?” And, as he speaks, he tightens, but does not close, the seal on her air supply.

Every breath is a journey, every thought a light hatching from crystal. Agnes finally feels the last click as Elias finishes opening her. To his credit, the drug had made the experience… not unpleasant. She licks her lips, between laborious breaths, and waits impatiently - impotently as Elias reaches up into the low ceiling to pull down a swivel mounted LED light, clicks it on, and angles it into her. She would swear she can feel the light _itself_ touching her deepest places.

“Oh, not _quite,_” Elias is waving a thin, orb-tipped steel wand, like the arm of a metronome, showing it off to her. She sees it as an eye atop a strand of sea-grass, waving lazily in the tide. In her altered state of perception, it is hypnotic, and the sympathetic effect on Elias’s perception is, he thinks later, one of the most arousing things that happens that night. With a frisson as he snaps the feedback loop, he prepares to turn the implement to its task. Agnes watches quizzically, his eyes only barely above the horizon of her body, and she sees them as twin suns which flare with her perception as the smooth, chilled steel orb presses gently against her - inside her, between the prongs of the diopter. She feels it slowly tracing a path deeper, and, with the growing context of its path, becomes aware, in a specific, visceral sense, of the shape and texture of her innards. The hot, wet flesh, rippling and slickly heterogeneous, against cold, uniform metal. When it has moved past being inhibited by the paddles holding her open, Elias swirls it in a spiral, pressing it against every available inch of her inner walls, until she feels it come to a rest at the back - certainly the back. (Elias here notes that her sexual education was stunningly lackluster. Was she raised in America? No matter.)

Agnes feels the swirling of the wand, drawing closer to something… central. It is a slowly rising note, as if drawn from the rim of a crystal goblet. It is a gravity, making her spasm and shudder in paroxysms of embrace. It reaches the center, the small aperture to somewhere, she now realizes, is deeper still. It does not, however, go in, push through, though she knows it could. Instead, it simply rotates. She, struggling to breathe, struggling to find the sense in the chaotic pan-sensory maelstrom, does not know how long.

She does not know how many times she struggled to suck in enough air to whimper, “Please,” but Elias does. She does not know how long she lay there, writhing without her body moving until she feels it as a remote sense organ, remade only to perceive, and herself, only to experience. She knows, now, again, briefly, how Elias must feel. She, as he does, understands. Tears come, now, not just of agony or pleasure, but of an innocent, evil happiness. Of course, she doesn’t know how much time passed between when Elias reached one hand up to cut her air off entirely and when her orgasm overtook her, long delayed and now long sustained, a truly breathless sensation-without-action. A transcendent, transient joy that rampages within her, like a separate being. Elias’s mind clings closer to hers now, and with her senses sharpened by overload and physical dissociation, she can feel him, welcome him, embrace him. The wild, impossible ecstasy expands to fill them both, and as it begins to return to the starlight, boiling away from their minds and bodies, each of them shining in the lamplight, Elias removes her mask, and, before she can scream to tell him no, Elias kisses her. The memory of Jack’s face melting away into her mouth rises up, and Elias drinks that, too.

And then she feels his tongue pushing into her mouth, demanding answer, his lips pressing against hers - still whole - and curling back from his teeth as he sharply nips her, growing impatient. She opens her eyes, confirming what she feels, but unable to explain it. She will have questions, later, and Elias knows this, welcomes it. But, just now, she lets herself be cradled against his chest, relishes his hand on her hair, and drifts into that other so-called facsimile of death, perchance, to dream.

Elias watches her sleep, and is confident that this was worth it, whatever _it_ would turn out to be.


End file.
